I recently had the pleasure of flying down to Miami for the Ecommerce Evolution Experience and I was pleasantly surprised at the list of SaaS marketing ideas and lessons I took from it.
This was supposed to be an event geared entirely for large retail and eCommerce brands and that’s not me. I work full time for Agorapulse – a B2B SaaS marketing solution – and I do fractional CMO work for select startup SaaS brands who need marketing strategy and leadership. So what was I doing at EEE, other than enjoying a trip to Miami in the middle of Winter?
Networking. Pure and simple.
I was there to meet the speakers and sponsors of the event in order to forge relationships and partnerships with these people and brands. In my role at Agorapulse, I shepherd a variety of relationships and partnership initiatives, and there’s no substitute for meeting people face-to-face and having the freedom and environment to have real conversations.
I talked to folks from brands like Shopify and Feedonomics, agencies like Absolute Web and Elevar, and enriched my relationship and partnership with my co-host Robin Dimond and her agency, Fifth & Cor. I connected with speakers like Ezra Firestone and Trey Littell, and now I have follow-up meetings scheduled with many of them, including Trey, who happens to be responsible for developing agency partnerships at Amazon.
So I came home feeling extremely accomplished both personally and professionally, but wait, there’s more!
One of the things I did not go to EEE for was the content. As I said, I’m a B2B SaaS marketer and generally do not work with eCommerce businesses. When I looked at an agenda filled with case studies and deep dives into the state of eCommerce in 2024, I assumed those session times would be better spent out in the hallways talking to bored sponsor booth reps.
Boy, was I wrong.
As I sat amongst the few hundred other attendees – a healthy mix of large eCommerce brands and the solutions that cater to them – I found myself almost unconsciously opening my Evernote app and jotting down notes and ideas as they came to me as a direct response to what was being talked about on stage.
These were great reminders to me that A) there are core marketing strategies and tactics that transcend industries and verticals, and B) it’s always a good idea to give yourself time to sharpen the axe. In that environment – in any event you might attend – sitting and listening to a presentation or conversation about how to help your business succeed, in any context, is going to present an opportunity for you to let your mind imagine how the ideas being discussed can be applied to the challenges you’re facing right now.
I’m sure nothing I’m about to share will be new to you, but I’m going to share these points as questions for you to consider because, if you don’t have a great, immediate answer, that might be something you need to drill down on. That’s what I’ll be doing in the coming weeks at Agorapulse and with my fractional CMO clients.
10 eCommerce Topics Applied To SaaS Marketing
1. What Is Your Current Customer Onboarding Sequence?
Let me be clear – I did not expect to learn anything from a panel on how a makeup brand is finding success at teaching their customers how to better apply makeup and nails. And yet, here we are.
Once I trimmed out the details of the brand’s solution, the concepts gelled immediately (pun intended). They had a rich library of video tutorials integrated into their website that provided step-by-step instructions on how to accomplish each task that every product supported, along with recommendations on other products the customer might not have been aware of that would make the tasks easier or better.
Takeaway: Every brand can and should do a better job of helping customers to be successful from Day One of being a customer. For SaaS brands, where instead of a catalog of products it may be a product with a suite of features, it’s challenging to build documentation that educates users on every aspect while simultaneously avoiding being overwhelming. That is where drip campaigns and Just in Time training can be invaluable tools. That’s also where it’s extremely help to have an active community where users can, by asking questions about features or functions, help educate other users to their existence as a by-product.
2. Are You Introducing Add-On Options?
The world of eCommerce, it’s all about upsells and cross sells and increasing AOV – Average Order Value. Incredible sums of money are invested in paid ads and other marketing tactics to drive potential customers to a website, and one of the most effective ways that a brand can decrease the CAC – Customer Acquisition Cost – is to make sure they check out with more items in their basket than they intended.
(If you’ve ever wondered why the checkout lanes at every grocery store and department store like Target are filled with candies and magazines and other inexpensive items, it’s the same theory. By simply inserting those items into your checkout process, they increase their overall sales which made their cost to get you into the store in the first place more valuable.)
Takeaway: No doubt this is a challenge for many in the SaaS space, and yet it’s not a lesson to be summarily ignored. If you’re a SaaS brand with truly a single product and subscription, without possibility of add-ons, that’s a challenge you’re going to have to address in 2024. Successful SaaS companies understand that expansion revenue is a core competency. For those brands who do have add-on options, too often those are left at the behest of the customer when they determine for themselves they’re needed.
In other words, there’s little to no mention of those add-ons up front because we’re scared of reducing conversions. However, most payment processors retain payment authorization for 60-90 minutes, which means after someone has subscribed and there’s no danger of losing the subscription, there’s a perfect window of opportunity to introduce your new customer to an add-on they might want and need, and get that added to the order without any additional checkout friction.
3. How Are You Leveraging Traffic To Key URLs That Don’t Opt In?
That same make-up brand from earlier had a digital magazine that they would drive a lot of traffic to, and which converted at a decent rate. They also assume that if someone’s on their website in the first place, clearly they have some general interest in their product offerings, so they invested in a tool that would attempt to match IP information and data available from other sources to obtain the email addresses of key URL visitors who didn’t opt in. These visitors could then be added to a different sequence of emails that attempted to gauge and pique their interest in actually learning more.
Takeaway: One of the key SaaS Marketing playbooks is to create resources that our target audience will find and opt in to receive, such as an eBook. These are terrific tactics to grow our email subscribers and prospects, while at the same time identify their interests or challenges just by the nature of their willingness to sign up for the resource. And while there could be a variety of legitimate reasons why a visitor wouldn’t convert on an opt in (i.e. not a product fit), there are also plenty of other reasons (i.e. too busy to fill out a form) that, if you had their contact information and were able to reach out, they might still be a solid prospect for your brand.
This wouldn’t be a high conversion rate tactic but if you’re already investing in traffic-driving tactics and getting a substantial amount of highly targeted visitors to a URL, recapturing even a small percentage of them could be extremely valuable.
4. What Is Your Remarketing Strategy?
One of the speakers, Ezra Firestone, is a serial entrepreneur and leads some incredibly successful retail and eCommerce brands, particularly in makeup. One brand is focused on catering to older women and brilliantly combines the social proof of UGC – User Generated Content – with remarketing advertising. He’ll invest a solid portion of his ad spend into driving traffic to 100% educational content – no conversion – so that the ad spend per click is far less expensive. Then he’ll advertise to everyone that clicked that first ad (remarket to them) using a video of someone who fits that demographic and therefore is someone they can relate to, leading to a sales page.
Takeaway: SaaS marketing strategy needs to have a holistic view of how every element of the brand’s properties and advertising elements can work together to funnel prospects to a sale won-closed. Paid traffic to blog posts and webinars and eBooks doesn’t just drive traffic and signups, it also qualifies those who click on the ads and creates a robust remarketing list that can be advertised to and further qualified, leveraging social proof and other hooks at the lower levels.
5. How Are You Testing Conversions? What Is Your CRO Strategy?
During a panel discussion, the concept of conversion rate optimization came up and the speaker made a point to call out all of the conventional advice when it comes to CRO – most of which talks about finding specific elements of your website, like the color of a CTA button, and only test that one element. They rightly pointed out that while a huge brand getting millions of visitors might appreciate a .2% improvement in conversion due to a color change, for the rest of us, .2% isn’t going to move the needle.
We need to increase conversions by half or more. So they advocated for much larger changes and tests.
Takeaway: SaaS brands need to be braver and bolder. While that doesn’t mean investing in a full rebrand or new website every month, that does mean considering your messaging, your value proposition, your pricing, and your positioning, and testing how changes to key elements like that can make a huge difference.
6. How Are You Segmenting Your Target Audiences And Customers?
Another point that came up multiple times wasn’t just the need to segment audiences and customers, but also the need to think carefully about what those segments mean and the opportunities that they represent. For instance, not only segmenting customers who bought a certain product so their interest is known, but realizing that the product in question typically needs replenished in 3 months and therefore there needs to be a timed sequence in place to prompt those customers to by again in 60-90 days.
Takeaway: In the SaaS marketing space, this might look like monitoring which articles are clicked in email newsletters to help paint a picture for which interests every subscriber has, and leverage those to deliver customized emails about new product releases. At Agorapulse, for instance, I’d want to know every email subscriber who ever clicked on an article we’ve ever published about influencer marketing, and then send them a new email sequence about the new Advocacy add-on that is particularly well-suited for managing influencer marketing campaigns.
7. How Are You Collecting Customer Success Stories And Tactics And Sharing Those Insights With Other Customers?
The idea of brand communities gets a lot of debate and discussion, and rightly so. It’s expensive and challenging and time-consuming to pull off, and a branded community isn’t always the right play for a company. But I was singularly impressed by one of the brands how not only had a terrific, active community, but were actively mining it for amazing stories and tactics. When customers shared there something they’d done or accomplished with the help of one of the brand’s products (or just in general, no brand attach), not only was that story in the community for members to see, the brand would share it with the wider audience as a lesson others could learn from.
Takeaway: Whether you have a formal community or not, every SaaS brand needs to have channels designed to talk to customers and get feedback and success stories. That’s one of the main reasons I’m launching Social Pulse Podcast – to have those conversations with great social media marketers and agency owners, regardless of whether they’re using Agorapulse.
8. Who Owns Each Of Your Key Metrics And Is Obsessed With Improving Them?
Another panel discussion featured the CEO of a shroom business and his comments were some of the most insightful of the day. In particular, when asked what some of his teams most important metrics were, he made a point to discuss how important it was to have someone obsessed with improving each of those metrics, even if just by a little. Because those little 1 or 2% improvements each week or month add up to massive improvements over the course of a year.
Takeaway: While it’s common in SaaS Marketing to have company and department KPI and to have a team member who is responsible for a subset of them, I think the idea of putting someone in charge of being obsessive over one or two key metrics is potentially revolutionary. Can you imagine how someone might move the needle for your business if all they’re concerned about is improving that one core metric every day, week and quarter?
9. How Are You Tracking And Monitoring Internal Site Search?
While most SEO conversations, particularly in SaaS marketing, are around Google and organic search traffic, most fail to observe what kinds of searches are happening once the user is already on your website. What are they trying to find once they’re on your web property, and what does that tell you about the visitors you’re getting?
Takeaway: There’s a potential treasure trove of information hiding in your own search logs, including blog content ideas, product improvement and add-on ideas, and ideas for marketing campaigns or website improvements.
10. What Are You Learning From Google Search Console?
One final reminder, and this one is definitely true for every brand: make sure someone in your organization is monitoring Google Search Console for the keywords your target audience is using and making determinations on how to leverage that information.
This is where you’ll spot opportunities for new content, new marketing campaigns, and new potential customers.
I’m going to work on asking these questions and implementing new ideas and improvements in the coming weeks, both for Agorapulse and my clients, as well as my own business.
